| Beschreibung: |
Like in other helping settings, coaching theory and practice stress the relevance of the coach-client relationship. While the coaching relationship is recognized as a core success factor for the efficiency of coaching, it concurrently still represents a “neglected issue in research” (Neukom et al. 2011; but see Jautz 2017). First psychological studies have investigated into the working alliance (e.g., Gessnitzer & Kauffeld, 2015) and more specifically, in the importance of empathy for the coach-client relationship (e.g., Will & Kauffeld, 2018). According to Graf and Pawelczyk (2014: 67), the “[…] coaching alliance is not a preordained entity but rather an interactional phenomenon that needs to be performed and accomplished in the actual conversation between […] coach and client”. Insights into the sequentially organized relational practices that embody such coaching alliances are paramount for a true understanding of the relationship between coach and client (see e.g. Muntigl & Horvarth 2014; Voutilainen & Peräkyla 2016 in a therapeutic context). Helping professions are based on an asymmetric conversational relationship due to the particular distribution of knowledge, power and expertise (Drew & Heritage 1992; Brock & Meer 2004; Voutilainen & Peräkylä 2014). Such communicative imbalances also characterize person-centered approaches: “it would be naïve to assume that such ‘client-centered’ counseling while less obviously authoritarian than the more medically oriented models, is necessary free from the effects of power” (Silverman 1997: 9). These imbalances originate in the institutional and organizational framing of such interactions and locally manifest themselves in dissimilar conversational participation (rights): hierarchical differences between coach and client thus function as organizational pre-conditions of communicative differences on the micro-level. For the purpose of this paper we look into 5 initial sessions of authentic executive coaching processes from Emotionally Intelligent Coaching (cf. Graf 2019). Our focus is on how coach-client dyads co-construct local and global asymmetries and their more or less hierarchical relationships on a turn-by-turn basis via negotiating the participants’ epistemic status as ‘coach’ and ‘client’ (e.g. using technical jargon or everyday language), via practices of global and local agenda setting (e.g. meta-pragmatic framing practices) or via practices of affiliation (e.g. validating or mirroring emotions, negotiating terms of address). |